There was one small episode during ICDE 2017, and although it has been a month already, I still feel like I want to write about. Here is want happened

Among other booths of different vendors there was (as usual) the Amazon AWS. And one of their reps told me,that on Thursday they are going to have a “women event”, and whether I want to sign up, and if I just could leave my email with them. I told her: well, there is a conference banquet on Thursday, at what time precisely your event is going to be? And she said reassuringly: after the banquet!

Now, the banquet would start at 6PM, and on Wednesday evening I receive the following email:

Hi Hettie,
I wanted to reach out on behalf of AWS and invite you to attend the AWS Women in Engineering Networking Event tomorrow on Thursday, April 20. Our recruitment and engineering teams are coming down from Seattle for the ICDE Conference and we’d love to meet you in-person at our happy hour at Blue Door Winery in San Diego (around 3 miles from the conference venue).
There will be wine tasting, artisanal bites, and a raffle on-site. Please feel free to bring guests, the more the merrier!

I am clicking on the invite, and guess what start time it shows? Yes, you are right – at 6PM.

Let me tell you that. The banquet is the most important social event at any conference, and I would always make a point for the younger generation about the importance of attending a conference banquet. There you can be introduced or just introduce yourself to anybody, you can talk at length with the authors of the papers which were most interesting for you. People just are more relaxed and do not run to attend the next session. And if somebody organized a “women networking event” at the same time – how this should be perceived? Like “kid’s table”?! How much this kind of networking would worth? And if the event organizers didn’t bother to look at the conference program when scheduling this event, it’s even worse…

Fortunately, at least at the first glance, there was not that many women who would trade the banquet for this networking event 🙂